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Companies like Algolia which provide a site specific search engine has been doing really well especially with the speed and relevancy where Google currently is

Companies like Algolia which provide a site specific search engine has been doing really well especially with the speed and relevancy where Google currently is not concentrating on. https://www.algolia.com/ https://www.algolia.com/

sergiotapia 10y ago
Algolia is a game-changer. They made it so incredibly simple to add search to your website. I'm not talking about their widgets, I'm talking about their server-side integrations and their javascript client-side lib. It's like magic. See it in action here: https://stackshare.io/match https://stackshare.io/match
- kapauldo 10y ago
  It's bizarre that algolia is a thing. Elasticsearch is good and free.
  - bsilvereagle 10y ago
    Yes, but Elasticsearch requires a dedicated server, you may have to use a river, you may have to shard, etc. Some people (most people?) don't want to think about shards & rivers and just want something to work. Algolia seems to do that.
    - eridius 10y ago
      I know what a shard is, but what's a river? I've never heard anyone use that term in a technical context before.
      - bsilvereagle 10y ago
        I used ES a long time ago and rivers have since been deprecated: https://www.elastic.co/blog/deprecating-rivers https://www.elastic.co/blog/deprecating-rivers A river was just a mapping from a database to ES. For example, you could search CouchDB with ES with the proper river set up.
      - mindingdata 10y ago
        In Elasticsearch a "river" is the description for the pushing of data from your primary store (A database more than likely) into the elasticsearch index. ES actually started with Rivers being part of Elastic but since deprecated it. You will still find people talking about "rivers" though as a description for however they are updating the index.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - toast0 10y ago
    I'll give you free, but I'm not sure about good. For the www site I run, we have run a one node instance on each machine; they regularly decide to go off into the weeds and not return results, and in the meantime use ridiculous amounts of ram. I wish Yahoo would have open sourced some of it's internal search tools. :( They weren't always simple to use, but they were stable.
  - hashmal 10y ago
    there are lots of things like this. it's bizarre that i pay for email when there are good and free email services (and my privacy/security needs are pretty damn simple.) people don't mind paying for things they like, or for something that provides just a little detail that others do not. Algolia provides things that elasticsearch do not, such as being hosted, being extremely simple to setup and having a default web interface for anyone to use.
    - nostrademons 10y ago
      There are plenty of companies providing hosted ElasticSearch these days, starting with Elastic.co, the corporate sponsors of the open-source project. Amazon hosted ES is also a lot better than it was just a few months ago; they were stuck on 1.5 for the longest time, but now they've already got support for 5.1.1.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        The database is just a building block for the search. You still have to implement a lot of logic and smartness on top. algolia does that out of the box.
        parthdesai 10y ago
        It's not that hard though. I'm a junior dev and i managed to implement ES ( AWS hosted of course) for our site search on my on own. If i can do it, pretty sure majority of people can do it.
        ice109 10y ago
        nothing like this is hard. being Junior or not has nothing to do with it. it's a question of investing time/money
- Fifer82 10y ago
  I just got this hooked up to firebase last week, amazing!
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  It's good in results, but too aggressive in updating live results -- the effect is laggy on systems I use, e.g., when searching HN.
  - sergiotapia 10y ago
    That's the fault of the implementation client-side. You shouldn't fire off an ajax request on every key stroke but leave a certain timeout zone after keys are pressed to detect "yeah this guy has finish typing, let's search now".
- vvoyer 10y ago
  Hi! Algolia employee here, thanks for the mention, did you encounter any issue using our widget based libraries or where you only willing to use the raw JavaScript client? Thanks!
greglindahl 10y ago
It's a crowded market, even though Google has basically withdrawn from it.

sergiotapia 10y ago

Algolia is a game-changer. They made it so incredibly simple to add search to your website. I'm not talking about their widgets, I'm talking about their server-side integrations and their javascript client-side lib. It's like magic. See it in action here: https://stackshare.io/match https://stackshare.io/match

kapauldo 10y ago
It's bizarre that algolia is a thing. Elasticsearch is good and free.
- bsilvereagle 10y ago
  Yes, but Elasticsearch requires a dedicated server, you may have to use a river, you may have to shard, etc. Some people (most people?) don't want to think about shards & rivers and just want something to work. Algolia seems to do that.
  - eridius 10y ago
    I know what a shard is, but what's a river? I've never heard anyone use that term in a technical context before.
    - bsilvereagle 10y ago
      I used ES a long time ago and rivers have since been deprecated: https://www.elastic.co/blog/deprecating-rivers https://www.elastic.co/blog/deprecating-rivers A river was just a mapping from a database to ES. For example, you could search CouchDB with ES with the proper river set up.
    - mindingdata 10y ago
      In Elasticsearch a "river" is the description for the pushing of data from your primary store (A database more than likely) into the elasticsearch index. ES actually started with Rivers being part of Elastic but since deprecated it. You will still find people talking about "rivers" though as a description for however they are updating the index.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- toast0 10y ago
  I'll give you free, but I'm not sure about good. For the www site I run, we have run a one node instance on each machine; they regularly decide to go off into the weeds and not return results, and in the meantime use ridiculous amounts of ram. I wish Yahoo would have open sourced some of it's internal search tools. :( They weren't always simple to use, but they were stable.
- hashmal 10y ago
  there are lots of things like this. it's bizarre that i pay for email when there are good and free email services (and my privacy/security needs are pretty damn simple.) people don't mind paying for things they like, or for something that provides just a little detail that others do not. Algolia provides things that elasticsearch do not, such as being hosted, being extremely simple to setup and having a default web interface for anyone to use.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    There are plenty of companies providing hosted ElasticSearch these days, starting with Elastic.co, the corporate sponsors of the open-source project. Amazon hosted ES is also a lot better than it was just a few months ago; they were stuck on 1.5 for the longest time, but now they've already got support for 5.1.1.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      The database is just a building block for the search. You still have to implement a lot of logic and smartness on top. algolia does that out of the box.
      - parthdesai 10y ago
        It's not that hard though. I'm a junior dev and i managed to implement ES ( AWS hosted of course) for our site search on my on own. If i can do it, pretty sure majority of people can do it.
        ice109 10y ago
        nothing like this is hard. being Junior or not has nothing to do with it. it's a question of investing time/money
Fifer82 10y ago
I just got this hooked up to firebase last week, amazing!
dredmorbius 10y ago
It's good in results, but too aggressive in updating live results -- the effect is laggy on systems I use, e.g., when searching HN.
- sergiotapia 10y ago
  That's the fault of the implementation client-side. You shouldn't fire off an ajax request on every key stroke but leave a certain timeout zone after keys are pressed to detect "yeah this guy has finish typing, let's search now".
vvoyer 10y ago
Hi! Algolia employee here, thanks for the mention, did you encounter any issue using our widget based libraries or where you only willing to use the raw JavaScript client? Thanks!

greglindahl 10y ago

It's a crowded market, even though Google has basically withdrawn from it.